Rod Brogan as Anthony Reilly and Jessica Wortham as Rosemary Muldoon are neighbors in a love story.

Rod Brogan as Anthony Reilly and Jessica Wortham as Rosemary Muldoon are neighbors in a love story.

Photo: Kevin Berne, TheatreWorks

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‘Outside Mullingar’ oozes Irish charm, some treacly

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You can tell how Rosemary feels about Anthony before she even speaks to him. As smoldering as the cigarettes she chain smokes, even out in the thick rain of their Irish village, her gaze is the product of decades of desire and fury, disappointment, contempt — and unquenchable hope.

“If she’d been in the Olympics boxing,” says her mother, Aoife (pronounced similarly to “Eva” and played by Lucinda Hitchcock Cone), “sure Ireland would have taken the gold.”

Rosemary (Jessica Wortham) is the kind of person who insults harder when she loves more; who in one moment is as uncomplicated as a wild animal in her ruthlessness, while in the next can joke wryly about her loneliness and her thoughts of suicide, as if observing herself from a great distance.

In other words, she’s a typical construction of John Patrick Shanley, the Oscar-, Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning writer known for characters who are both complex and disarmingly forthright about their complexity. (For that reason, his work is a go-to option, especially for young actors, for audition monologues.) In her portrayal of Rosemary for TheatreWorks, where the show opened Saturday, Oct. 8, under Robert Kelley’s direction, Wortham drives the script forward with locomotive momentum, chugging along with workhorse intensity until, late in the play, the show reaches a steady clip through the sheer force of her will.

The drama certainly isn’t going to gain any speed from Anthony, who, though in middle age, hasn’t yet grown up in many ways. He still calls his father, Tony (Steve Brady), “Daddy,” and can’t stand up to the man even when he argues sheer nonsense — like saying he wouldn’t leave his farm to his only son, who’s spent his whole life working it, because he takes after his mother’s side of the family and doesn’t “love” it enough.

If Anthony (Rod Brogan) is spineless, he’s also very sweet, with a poetic way of looking at his simple, humdrum life: “There’s the green fields, and the animals living off them. And over that there’s us, living off the animals. And over that there’s that which tends to us and lives off us.” Playing this childlike creature, Brogan is most effective when he creates comic contrast between his large stature and his deer-in-the-headlights reaction to any mention of love or lust.

Still, it strains credulity that a 42-year-old man and a 36-year-old woman who have been neighbors their whole lives, close enough to hear each other’s teakettles whistle or their mothers sing while they wash the dishes, wouldn’t have figured out decades ago that they’re madly in love with one another and acted on it. Though the play is set after the declawing of the Celtic Tiger, there’s a nostalgic, sentimental quality to it, almost as if Rosemary and Anthony were in a fairy tale, gazing adoringly at each other from their respective castle towers; instead of being trapped by evil stepmothers, it’s their own shame about their flaws and mistakes, their twisted senses of duty to family legacy and church, their haunting by ghosts, that keeps them locked inside.

Though some of the lines ooze treacle — such as Anthony’s “aww”-inducing remark comparing Rosemary to a flower — and as with all romantic comedies the end is a foregone conclusion, you’d be pretty heartless not to allow “Outside Mullingar” to work its Irish charms on you.